180 Western American Literature ness to the nearest road, river, or camp— only to repeat the process again and again in response to the lookouts’ calls. Formerly a smokejumper him self (and now a retired English professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), Jenkins brings together twenty-one stories, several enriched by diary entries and letters, and illustrated by over fifty pages of spectacular black and white photographs by Life m agazine’s Peter Stackpole. Under such evocative titles as “D ouble D elight in the Bitterroot W ilderness,” “We Jump into Fire,” and “G allows in the Sky,” Jenkins recounts the exhilaration of smokejumping but also the perils posed by chutes that fail to open or hang up in trees, landings in rivers or in the fires them selves, and the grueling demands of building a fire line with axe and shovel. Indeed, the hardship and danger of the smokejumper’s life emerge again and again, nowhere more poignantly than in the account of the tragic Mann Gulch fire of August 5, 1949. A ssisted in part by Norman M aclean’s record of the event, Jenkins reconstructs the afternoon during which thirteen smokejumpers lost their lives when a rogue wind turned the fire back upon them. Mann Gulch forms the mythic center of the book, foreshadowed in its early chapters and pictorially recounted in Stackpole’s photographs. Like Dana’s Two Years Before the M ast and Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, two books which Jenkins’s smokejumper brother Hugh enthusiastically recalls in a letter home near the volum e’s end, Smokejumpers, ’49 contributes a thrilling page to the historical record of adventure in the American West. CHRISTOPHER S. BUSCH H illsdale College Iron House: Stories from the Yard. By Jerome Washington. (Fort Bragg, California: QED Press, 1994. 166 pages, $18.95.) Jerome W ashington’s Iron House: Stories from the Yard won the Western States Arts Federation Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Divided into five sections— “American Justice,” “Inside History,” “Escapes,” “R elease,” and “Time After Time”— this book chronicles the author’s experiences from his imprisonment in 1972 in New York’s Auburn State Prison to his eventual return to freedom some sixteen years later. An author and political activist when he was arrested, W ashington contin ued to write, publish, and even coordinate a collective producing hundreds of newspapers monthly. Transferred to Attica by Auburn’s warden, the author argues, “to silence my voice as a writer,” Washington sued and eventually won a landmark court case that held that even incarcerated writers are protected under the First Amendment. However, Iron House is not a book about Jerome W ashington’s writing or his crimes; instead, this prize-winning piece, with the pace o f fine fiction, is a Reviews 181 loosely connected collection of character sketches, vignettes, meditations, and aphorisms that reveal the horror and humor, the violence and tenderness, and the passion and pity in the daily life the author experienced behind prison w alls. The cast of characters is full of hopeless and hopeful men, a few quirky oddballs, con artists, bullies, murderers, and cellblock lawyers and philoso phers . . . all trying to survive. There is Orangutan Jones, a man driven insane by a woman who breaks off all contact with him; Lobo, a M ississippian who kills another inmate and, explaining that “there ain’t no place to run” in prison, calm ly awaits the guards; Old Man Henry Carter, who came to prison “before rules were rules”; the practical and vicious guard, Captain Boss; the spiritual Jomo, the jailhouse mystic who teaches Washington how to escape into his own imagination; and dozens more. Some are colorful, many evoke sympathy, and others talk jive and walk the razor’s edge. Much to Jerome W ashington’s credit, this is not a preachy book. However, it does offer a strong, usually even-handed indictment of this country’s prison system , as w ell as an indictment of people— and not simply convicts— who prey on the weak, who rob, steal, lie, cheat, rape, murder. Finally, Iron House: Stories from the Yard is a tribute to the author’s triumph over seem ingly im...
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Mar 1, 1999
Jennifer J Burg + 3
Open Access